IT IS HARD TO BE CLEAR in these matters: yet, I hazard that Society—with a capital S—is a direct result of the actual and moral options offered by the State. And yet, on the other hand, the State as we know it is very largely, if not entirely, the result of the actual and moral exhaustion of society, with a small s. The actual, baffling, continuing, and wounding relations which obtain among human beings cause us to long for Authority as deeply as we long for water: and the personal authority surrenders to a larger one, which, if it cannot save us from death, can protect us from chaos. (To be Catholic, with a large C, for example, is not at all the same thing as being catholic.)
Hence, we need victims: object lessons. And this need, which never fails to announce itself as Moral, has nothing whatever to do with morality or any moral hope. This need becomes the quicksand in which all hope of the moral life expires.
Yet, there lives, always and with unpredictable results, within the human being who is society something which that Society which controls him—and which he has created—can never know, or reach. It is this inchoate, largely incoherent, and irrepressible energy which has demolished empires. Every State, without exception, co-opts, corrupts, or destroys all those within its proclaimed jurisdiction—and sometimes, as in the present century, beyond it—capable of saying, “No.” But no State has been able to foresee or prevent the day when their most ruined and abject accomplice—or most expensively dressed prostitute—will growl, “This far and no further.”
Or what their children have been watching, or how they will act on what they have seen; and what they see.
Now, the State creates the Criminal, of every conceivable type and stripe, because the State cannot operate without the Criminal. The nature of their operation demands fraud, coercion, secrecy, and the power to intimidate: in no way whatever, for example, do the tactics of the financier or the successful racketeer differ from those of the FBI or the CIA—or, for that matter, the cop on the corner. Your intimidated neighbor may be, at this very moment, telling the FBI everything he thinks he knows about you. And your neighbor is not betraying you. He knows that where there’s smoke, there must be fire: he has been enlisted in the service of Authority, which knows more than he—about you. And, of course, the good Lord alone has any idea of what they may know about him. Hanging over his head is the choice of becoming a Criminal accomplice or a Prisoner.
Anyone old enough to remember the McCarthy era and the shameful case—among others—of the Rosenbergs knows what I am talking about.
If the State creates the Criminal, and uses him, until—for reasons of State—it becomes necessary that he be, with extreme prejudice, terminated, it simply throws the Prisoner into Society’s lap. This has the effect of reassuring Society that Society is being protected while, at the same time, causing him to hate the Prisoner (far more than he hates the Criminal) because the Prisoner—so he is told, every hour on the hour—is costing him an awful lot of money. Without pursuing the fascinating economics of a system which permits the State to profit from the Criminal while forcing Society to pay for the Prisoner, it is interesting that Society numbly shakes the collective head when told—not asked—about the latest expensive bash at the Pentagon. Now, of course, the prisons are full of Criminals. This is not, however, what distinguishes a prison or a penitentiary from the streets we walk or a bank or a church or an advertising agency. The Criminal, that is, may or may not be a Prisoner, and the Prisoner may or may not be a Criminal. All that we can really claim to know about the Prisoner is that he or she is a human being, like ourselves, who has been caught, who has been incarcerated. He/she went mad with an axe or a razor or a knife or a gun or raped someone or killed someone to get his/her fix or got caught with dope or stole forty or seventy or a hundred dollars. But rarely is the Prisoner someone who has managed to embezzle, say, two or three million dollars. Rarely is it someone who has managed to bankrupt the public trust: rare and spectacular it is that the Prisoner has been dragged from the seats of power. A very great Criminal, Franco, for but one example, was never hauled before the moral Western tribunal on any charge; created a multitude of prisoners, to say nothing of corpses; and died, allegedly senile and infantile but otherwise quite peacefully, in bed. In his own bed. However many men he may have caused to be tortured to death, however many men he caused to live and die with the prison stink of multitudes of men in their nostrils, Franco, the Criminal, never had to undergo the perpetual indignity of the Prisoner.
I once flew quite a long way to see a friend of mine in prison. I was coming as a journalist, and had so informed the Warden by telephone, the day before: for the case was, essentially, political, and I was to do an interview. I was on assignment from a black paper, a weekly. But no, said the Warden, only reporters from daily papers were allowed. I had never heard of this limitation before; but, then, there was no reason that I should have—though I did realize, suddenly, that there were no black daily newspapers in America, and my friend is black. Well, I got another assignment, from a daily, and presented myself at the prison. I sat alone in the Warden’s office for quite some time—fighting paranoia, one may say, but I yet had to face the fact that Authority was not overjoyed by my arrival. And I was resigning myself to the probable necessity of having to leave and come back another day—for visiting hours were almost over—when I was allowed in, with a distinctly chilling assignment.
My friend had refused—as I knew—to work in the prison factory at prison prices. He wanted a Union wage. The Warden was sure that I understood how disruptive this was for the prison routine and how unrealistic and inconsiderate my friend was being. I think that I assured him that I did, may have offered him my heartfelt sympathy: I was capable, at that moment, of saying anything. The Warden wanted me—if I was really the friend I claimed to be—to persuade his Prisoner to be cooperative: it would help when the time came for him to appear before the Parole Board.
What a terrifying apprehension of crime and punishment! I had flown nearly ten thousand miles to see a brother I loved in order to deliver a far from veiled threat: Cooperate, or …?
I suppose that all that a man can learn in prison is why he is there: an unimaginably lonely and private assessment, which nevertheless, at the very least, releases him from the Society’s presumption as to why he is there. I do not pretend, in any way whatever, to be able to assess the price the person who is the Prisoner pays: but I know that prisons do not rehabilitate, because it is not their purpose and it is not in their power. One is not rehabilitated by learning to cooperate with the structure designed to debase the person into the Prisoner. Nor do men repent in “penitentiaries”: the word itself reveals the mercilessly self-righteous Puritan delusion. Repentance is a private matter, and no more than forgiveness can it be coerced. Society, responsive to the will and the needs of the State, slams the door on the Prisoner with the vindictive vehemence of the blow meant to shatter a mirror.
I visited Death Row prisoners not long ago, and so I am compelled to point out that the Prisoner is likely, on the whole, to be inescapably visible: Death Row, like the ghetto, is dark with dark faces. The incarceration of the Prisoner reveals nothing about the Prisoner, but reveals volumes concerning those who hold the keys. And finally, then, since I am an American discussing American Prisoners, we are also discussing one more aspect of the compulsive American dream of genocide.
On different levels, the Artist and the Prisoner must fight very hard against debasement and isolation. It is the responsibility of the Artist perpetually to question the zealous State and the narcoticized Society. Or—bearing in mind that, for the most part, it is the poor and the helpless who are incarcerated while the able and affluent fly away—it may be time to suggest that if the State depended less heavily on criminals, the Society would be burdened with fewer prisoners.
Then we, as society with a small s, might be enabled to reassume our real responsibilities for each other and for all our children and tear down those incarcerations which we have built for others and in which we strangle, daily, on our own vomit.
(1983)